


Apprehend

by Kurukami



Category: Italian Job (2003), Mad Max: Fury Road, X-Men (Movies), X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Gen, I dare you to watch The Italian Job and not feel for John Bridger, Multi-Era, Mutants, Precognition, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-15
Updated: 2015-08-15
Packaged: 2018-04-14 18:42:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4575516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kurukami/pseuds/Kurukami
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John Bridger had quick, clever hands, a deft touch with just about any lock or safe he’d ever come across, and another four months left on his sentence – for crimes which he, if asked, would assure anyone were very much exaggerated by the prosecuting authorities – when, quite to his surprise, the word came down from the warden’s office about a pair of visitors there to meet with him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Apprehend

**Author's Note:**

> **apprehend** (verb)  
>    _1\. to take into custody; arrest by legal warrant or authority_  
>    _2\. to grasp the meaning of; understand, especially intuitively; perceive_  
>    _3\. to expect with anxiety, suspicion, or fear; anticipate_

July of 1962 was brutally hot in New York City, and Rikers Island was no exception. The single-occupancy cells in Cellblock 3B in the House of Detention for Men – miserable accommodations of stark grey concrete that measured maybe five feet wide, eight feet long and seven feet high – usually turned into hellish, humid ovens in the four-month span between May and September. July, so far, was turning out to be remarkably unpleasant even by those standards. The prison’s corridors had turned ugly in the dog days of summer, fusty with the heat and the stink of so many bodies, and tempers were dangerously short even in what space was available in the exercise yards. 

John Bridger had quick, clever hands, a deft touch with just about any lock or safe he’d ever come across, and another four months left on his sentence – for crimes which he, if asked, would assure anyone were very much exaggerated by the prosecuting authorities – when, quite to his surprise, the word came down from the warden’s office about a pair of visitors there to meet with him.

There had been something off about the whole week already, beyond just the damnably unrelenting heat. John had had the sense that he was being observed, somehow, and it wasn’t the usual subtle glances of fellow inmates, or the impassive stares of the guards, or really anything he could put coherent words to. It made him anxious in a way that he wasn’t wholly familiar with, and that in itself was disconcerting. Ever since his youth, he’d often had an unusual sense for when things were going to go awry, an anticipation of where trouble might be coming from. It was some uncanny acumen, like a guardian angel that he’d have sworn was watching his back; a fortuitous intuition that, after so many years, he trusted instinctively to steer him away from harm. He was reasonably sure, in a way he never would have confessed out loud, that it had on more than one occasion kept him from a beating or worse, both inside of prison and out. 

(Setting aside the manner in which he had ended up here, that was, but that would’ve been nearly impossible for _anyone_ to predict. Unless you were one of those suckers that bought into the vague, nebulous ramblings of fortune tellers lurking behind neon signs over on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, maybe, and John had never counted himself among that number.)

But this, well, this felt… _different._

“Huh,” he managed, squinting against the noontime brilliance at the guard who had called him over. McGrane, that was the guard’s name. John hadn’t been expecting anyone, but then again, if the past week’s anxiety was anything to judge by... “Did they happen to say who they were?”

“What, you takin’ reservations now as to who can and can’t visit you?” McGrane scowled up at him, the frown looking like it found a home all too frequently beneath the broad moustache on his pudgy bulldog features. One of the guard’s hands rested comfortably on the grip of the truncheon hooked to his belt. “Warden says bring you in, here I am, so don’t bust my balls about it.”

“No, that’s not what I meant, I just –“ John cut short his reply, feeling intuition solidify inside him. McGrane didn’t give a damn what his concerns might be, that was for sure, and trying to wring any other news from him would likely result in some form of not-so-subtle payback in the very near future. 

It was a Sunday, which usually meant that the only inmates who could receive visitors were those whose last names started with a letter between M and Z. That someone had enough pull to bend the normal rules in favor of meeting with him suggested a number of interesting things, only a small number of which were positive. John crossed his arms as deferentially as he could, surreptitiously checking the short length of stiff, pre-bent wire he’d secreted inside one of the sleeve hems. If need be, he figured, he could probably get out of whatever prison-issue handcuffs the guards might put on him in under five seconds.

Besides which, John reasoned, the visitation rooms typically had air conditioning. Regardless of who the people wanting to speak with him turned out to be, there was no sense in turning down an hour or two in far more pleasant surroundings than these.

Best not to rock the boat.

“Sorry, sir. Point the way.”

McGrane narrowed his eyes at John’s newfound meekness, but said nothing more. Instead, he turned and gestured the inmate back inside and down the cellblock corridor. In short order, John found himself passed off from McGrane to a succession of other guards, where he was handcuffed, frisked for weapons, and finally escorted to a private room that was without question somewhere other than one of the typical visitation booths. Not that he’d had a great many visitors, it was true, but still the surprise of _this_ made him hesitate just inside the room’s prison-side door. No two-sided cubbyholes for what passed for privacy behind bars, no panes of bullet-resistant glass, no telephone handsets to hold a conversation through – just a plain, unvarnished room with high, barred windows, a bolted-down table and a scant handful of chairs. “Not the usual place?”

“Not today, convict,” one of the guards – Bjarnisson, his name badge read – replied flatly. “Whoever’s visiting you, the Warden had specific instructions as to where we were supposed to put you and how.”

And didn’t _that_ sound ominous. John was able to keep his expression blank, though it was a closer thing than he would have liked. They put him in the one chair on prison-side, across the table from the two nearer the door that led to the entry corridors. Bjarnisson affixed his shackles to a U-bolt that went straight through the tabletop. And then they left him alone to wait for whoever his enigmatic guests might be.

Gingerly, he tested the table’s anchor-bolts, then the U-bolt itself, and finally what manual mobility he still retained despite the cuffs. He could still reach the wire-prepared hem, if he needed to, but it’d be awkward enough to do that he mentally tacked another couple of seconds onto his earlier estimate of time needed to slip the cuffs. 

God willing, it wouldn’t be necessary. John didn’t consider himself a religious man, by any means, but finding himself in situations where he couldn’t discern all or even most of the variables involved made him uneasy. You could trust in people to act certain ways, as long as you understood their motivations. And for the most part, he trusted everyone, within those boundaries; he just didn’t trust the devil inside them. Not anymore. Trusting unreservedly was how he’d ended up in Rikers, after all, and in this particular situation he didn’t know the first thing about who was coming for him or why.

For the moment, though, there wasn’t anyone around to either trust or distrust, so he took a deep breath and tried to let the tension ebb out of his shoulders. There wasn’t much point to speculating what might happen, given the shortage of available information; might as well do his best to fix his mind on other things. To pass the time, he gently traced the outer contours of the handcuffs with his fingertips, letting his eyes wander idly around the austere confines of the room. 

The cuffs were Peerless-made and chromed steel, that much was obvious – the kind of restraints that prison guards with a limited budget but an eye for a bit of flash favored, more often than not – but had the slot-activated double lock that made them a little more challenging to get out of. He couldn’t just shim his way free of them, since they were locked to neither release nor ratchet any tighter, but with a properly improvised tool – like the wire hidden in his shirt hem, which he could use to pick the lock – it wouldn’t make any difference. Out was out.

Aside from the shackles that anchored him to the table, it wasn’t a particularly unpleasant place to have to wait. In here, at least, it was blessedly cool. Compared to the sweltering heat outside, it was damn near paradise. Without the heat to distract him, John lost himself in picturing the interior workings of the cuffs, seeing in his mind’s eye the precise ways the curves and twists of the locking mechanisms meshed together, as specific in their purpose as the inner workings of a clock though nowhere near as complex. The noises of whatever was happening in the corridors beyond this room, and in the exercise yards beyond that, faded beneath the thrum of the building’s air conditioning and the _tik-tik-tik_ of the ceiling fan. He felt calm, focused, surprisingly clearheaded, but when the far door suddenly swung open the unexpected motion still made him startle just a bit.

There was a tiny _click_ from somewhere near his hands, buried underneath the creak of the door’s hinges and the rattle of the knob. It had been soft enough that, if his attention hadn’t been focused entirely on the handcuffs just a moment ago, he easily might’ve missed it entirely. He stared at the cuffs around his wrists for a long heartbeat, distracted, before he moved his gaze to the doorway. 

Hadn’t the double-lock mechanisms been engaged, before?

“Thank you, Deputy Warden Buono, but I’m confident we can handle matters from here,” a man’s voice rang out. A pair of men strode in, shutting the door behind them, and John took the opportunity to quickly study them.

The first thing he noticed was that the two of them were as different as peppers and corn. Neither wore the kind of cheaply manufactured off-the-rack suit he’d come to expect from police detectives, or even from the few G-men he’d had the misfortune to cross paths with, which eliminated a few possibilities from the mental list he’d been compiling. On the other hand, they didn’t share the same flashy, well-tailored look John associated with particularly ambitious members of the Five Families either. Those observations combined meant that his first couple of assumptions about just who wanted to speak with him had gone down the drain fast as dishwater.

The man who’d spoken to the deputy warden sounded like a Brit, to start with – one of those upper-class, Eton-educated poncy ones – and the way he dressed and held himself suggested money. He had on what looked like a bespoke single-breasted light grey jacket and darker grey slacks, with a starched, pale blue shirt unbuttoned at the collar and shoes that looked expensive even to John’s inexperienced eye. His hair was dark brown, his eyes a shocking blue the color of cornflowers, and the expression on his face was the most open and friendly John had seen in months. He looked like some kind of university professor who’d wandered away from scholastic grounds before achieving tenure, not yet made grey by the passage of years.

The other man, though, looked like the sort John wouldn’t want to anger, here in the cellblocks of Rikers or anywhere else. He was shorter than John’s own height by maybe a handswidth, though he towered over his British companion by a good four or five inches. It wasn’t his stature that gave John pause, though. There was a tautness around the man’s eyes, a coldness to his gaze that John associated with the sort of inmates that were as likely to end up in the Bing for a few months of solitary confinement after a violent assault as they were to be walking free in the yard. The clothes he wore were well-made but utilitarian, straightforward and no-nonsense: a black collared polo shirt under a brown leather jacket that had enough scuffs on it to suggest everyday usage, khaki slacks cinched tight with an unornamented belt, and a pair of boots that John suspected had steel-capped toes and reinforced soles. The man’s hair was brassy, clipped short enough that it would provide next to no handhold in a brawl, and his gaze, while blue, was closer to steel than cornflowers. He carried himself with an easy, prowling grace, the kind that murmured low warnings about the possibility of violence rather than shouting it outright.

The two of them might not be police, John thought as they sat down across from him, but if there was ever a pair that embodied the good cop-bad cop dichotomy better than these two he hadn’t seen it yet.

“John Bridger. That’s your name, isn’t it?” asked the Brit, opening the file folder he’d carried in tucked beneath one arm.

“Yeah, that’s me,” John replied, trying for a studiedly neutral tone.

“Born July 17, 1935. Grew up on a medium-sized farm partway between Rushville and Canandaigua, New York. Youngest son of three. Mother was Dagna Isobel Bridger, maiden name Kohler, who died giving birth to you.”

John felt his jaw drop open. It was surprisingly unsettling, hearing this man rattle off facts like so many bottles off a factory line. “How did you—”

The Brit rolled over his interruption with the barest of pauses. “Father was Frederick Niklas Bridger, previously Brücker, immigrated from Germany as a child in 1899. History of alcoholism, assault, disturbing the peace, though admittedly most of that was after your mother’s passing. Older brothers James and Jacob Bridger, both enlisted after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December, 1941. Neither, unfortunately, survived the War. Jacob died in Italy late in 1943; James on the island of Iwo Jima in February 1945.”

“—now wait just a second, Goddamnit—”

“You were ten years old by the time the War came to an end. You remained enrolled at Saint Mary’s School, in Canandaigua, long enough to achieve—“ The Brit lifted a page that was dense with text to check something on the one following it, _hmmphed_ with approval, then let the page fall back into place. “—some notably impressive marks.”

“—how could you possibly know all those things about—”

“Upon your father growing persistently ill in 1950, though, you dropped out of school and took up a locksmith’s apprenticeship under one Giovanni Bruno. Despite successfully completing the apprenticeship program, your efforts were insufficient to pay for the mortgage on your father’s farm alone, a situation which only became worse after his death later that year.” The Brit paused, flicking a glance across the table at John, then sideways towards his companion – who, as yet, hadn’t spoken a word. The other met his glance and shrugged, almost unnoticeably, and the Brit looked back to the pages in front of him. “At which point you relocated to New York City and eventually, despite what the scant evidence might suggest were some superb early exploits as a cat burglar and a safecracker, came to the attention of the New York City Police Department, and shortly thereafter their Department of Corrections. The latter of which you have intermittently been a guest of for—”

“—just hold it right there, you crazy limey bastard—”

“—well, let’s be honest, Mr. Bridger, a surprisingly _small_ portion of the time since. Which says quite a few things about both your expertise and your discretion, I imagine. Regardless of your occasional entanglements with the law in the decade or so since your first arrest, however,” the Brit lifted his gaze from the page and met John’s disbelieving stare with a surprisingly amiable smile, “there’s never been any evidence of you committing a violent crime. Despite some of the, hmmm, questionable company you’ve kept. Particularly of late.”

John found himself, peculiarly, at a complete loss for words. He stared across the breadth of the table at his two interrogators with incredulity, feeling disbelief and shock roll through him at hearing his life to date so accurately recounted.

“ _Ist das wahr, nicht wahr?_ ” the other man, the one with the steel-blue eyes, said unexpectedly.

“Uh,” John managed, caught off guard. What on earth _was_ this? Interpol? “ _Ja, ich habe nie eine Gewalttat begangen._ ”

The Brit cleared his throat and continued. “You speak German fluently, Latin and Italian passably, and your limited criminal records suggest a surprising talent for not only puzzling out the inner workings of locks and safes, but for anticipating the arrival of trouble with remarkable prescience, both in the world outside and here in prison as well.“

“Just who the hell are you two, anyways?”

“My name is Charles Xavier. My friend here,” the Brit made an offhanded gesture, “is Erik Lensherr.”

The cold-eyed man nodded to him. “We have a proposition for you. A job offer, so to speak, from certain interested parties within the American government. A chance to utilize your particular talents, and a chance to be released from prison _today,_ rather than four months from now. Unless, of course, you actually enjoy being behind bars,” he added dismissively.

John opened his mouth to retort, then paused, swallowing the first words that tried to burst out. “Well,” he said after a moment’s reflection, “I can’t say that doesn’t sound interesting. But why me? I’m sure the feds must have an impressively large pool of potential conscripts to choose from.”

“As I said, Mr. Bridger,” Xavier replied, “You have certain unusual talents. Talents which are similar to the ones we also possess, in fact. And… how shall I put this?”

The Brit glanced sideways at his companion again. Lensherr let his cool gaze flick towards Xavier for a moment, a faint smile twisting one side of his mouth, before he focused it once again towards John. “We’ll show you ours if you show us yours.”

John narrowed his eyes at them. Despite some of the spook stories his fellow inmates told – one in particular made the rounds a bunch, about some legendary convict who could steal souls and who had casually walked out of a maximum security cellblock in a guard’s uniform one day, never to be seen again – he didn’t really buy into anything to do with the supernatural. It was like those so-called psychics you’d see at the carnival, the ones who had no gift more esoteric than being damned good at reading body language and knowing when to feed gullible tourists a line to lead them towards particular behavior. Some people had unusual gifts, sure, or were more talented than others, but that didn’t mean there was anything freakish about it, just like it didn’t mean anything that he himself stood six foot four, had bold blue eyes and an offbeat grin, and spoke multiple languages. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.”

Lensherr scowled at him impatiently, then gestured with one hand, and without warning John felt a hard yank at the sleeve of his prison uniform. There was the sharp _shhhrrrip_ of fabric tearing as it pulled him sideways, and a brief instant’s pain as the edge of the cuff binding that arm dug into his wrist. John jerked away from the pull in instinctive panic, his thoughts a sudden tangle of fear and visceral dread, and all he could think in that moment was that those grisly stories he’d heard whispered in the cells were true, the ones about eldritch prestidigitations and unsavory hoodoos, that somehow Lensherr had laid a curse on him and some unnamable horror was tearing itself free of his body. Reflexively, he banged the handcuffs down hard as he placed his palms flat against the tabletop and lunged backwards, away from Lensherr and the table. The move was involuntary, honed by months of hunches keeping him safe here in Rikers, and just an instant too late he realized that he was going to end up with some even more unpleasant bruising on his wrists as his chair screeched backwards and the cuffs went taut—

—only to find his hands suddenly unencumbered by the metal bands and the chair tangled beneath him as he fell, spilling him into an ungainly tumble on the hard floor.

“Wait, Mr. Bridger, calm down!” Xavier said placatingly, half out of his chair but hands held up to show empty palms. “We’re not here to—Erik, did you—”

“The cuffs weren’t me, Charles,” Lensherr asserted, cool and steady, half-focused on something in the air between them. “That was him.”

John followed Lensherr’s gaze, looked down at the torn sleeve, then up again. There, hovering above the table without any visible means of support, was the makeshift wire lockpick he’d had concealed in the hem.

( _You have to understand, John,_ ) Xavier’s voice came, soothingly, even though the man hadn’t opened his mouth, ( _you aren’t the only one with gifts._ )

John shook his head. The voice seemed to come from nowhere, and all around, at the same time. “How are you… doing that?”

Lensherr curled his fingers with a beckoning gesture, and the wire lockpick drifted unerringly to his grasp.

“How did you manage to free yourself from those handcuffs?” Xavier replied amiably, with a quick glance at the unlocked shackles. He stepped carefully around the table, hands still open, moving slowly so as not to imply threat. 

“I can’t – I’m not sure,” John said dazedly. The surface of the concrete beneath him was unyielding, cold, minutely ridged against his palms in the way that improperly leveled concrete occasionally dried. “I know locks, I know cuffs, and before you came in I was thinking of what I’d need to do to get out of them if I needed to use – uh –” He gestured wordlessly at the twisted wire Lensherr now held.

“There are people in this world who possess unusual gifts, things beyond the normal ken,” Xavier said. “Such things are mutations from the more commonplace genotypes. They can range from the simple – say, a person who has eyes of two different colors – to far more esoteric talents.” ( _The ability to read thoughts and speak mind-to-mind, for example,_ ) Xavier’s voice came to him again. ( _Or to manipulate metal with a thought or a gesture._ )

“So, wait, you think I’m one of these… mutations?”

“Mutants, but yes. We believe you are,” said Lensherr.

“The thing is, John – may I call you John? – that abilities like ours are neutral in morality,” Xavier said. “It’s the people who possess them who decide what they’ll use them for. The reason we’re here is that there are mutants in the world who have already used their abilities to harm people, and we believe that unless measures are taken to stop them they’ll do even worse in the future.”

“Shaw’s _already_ done worse,” muttered Lensherr, his expression one of tightly controlled fury.

Xavier threw him a quelling glance, then turned back and offered his hand. “John. Will you take this opportunity, and help us?”

John looked up at Xavier, reached up one hand to grasp his and he – 

– felt his mind explode into a hundred thousand fragments.

.  
.  
.

_pain_

_brilliance_

_deafening clamor of possibility_

_too many permutations_

_so many_

_myriad_

_ways_

_glimpses_

_of what might_

_yet_

_be?_

\-- sees himself in a uniform: corn-yellow and navy blue;  
an airplane, hovering in midair  
\- a submarine, improbably, likewise -  
himself, laid out on a blinding white beach,  
throat torn open and blood spilled sanguine across the grains of sand  
and it makes no difference, no difference at all -- 

**_a woman and a man, warriors both,  
sit in the front seats of a long black semi-trailer_ **

\-- hears a newborn baby crying,  
sees a tow-headed girl-child taking her first steps,  
feels joy: she cracks her first combination lock,  
looks up at him, her grin radiant with accomplishment,  
the same grin that she wears as she weaves a vermillion car round many obstacles;  
from darkness into light, she twists and angles, blazing through a maze of boulevards;  
she lifts her rifle to sight down the barrel at the headlight  
lurching towards them out of the darkness and  
– no, that is another -- 

**_fleeing across the desert from a horde of white-painted zealots  
who ride atop an incalculable armada of disparate vehicles_ **

\-- sees a pair of sleek skyscrapers rising, soaring, shiny and chrome,  
from the rubbled remains of Radio Row;  
a pair of gleaming jet planes batter against them in midmorning light,  
dousing them in oil and smoke and fire and blood;  
he sees the towers come tumbling down, reduced again to rubble,  
and as they go so thereafter goes the world -- 

**_in the back seat sleep a handful of refugees, innocents,  
bloodied and abused and deceived: they are not things_ **

\-- sees bleached bone-arrows and bloodied swords and blackened scales,  
bent on conquest, taking peace and plenty and vitality from the world,  
the hands wielding them are legion,  
falling upon guilty and innocent alike -- 

**_they’re looking for hope, says the woman,_**  
**_her hair shorn short, her left hand and forearm_**  
**_steel in place of flesh_**

\-- senses more than sees, like a blind man able  
to point out the sun’s place in the sky:  
a noxious gaseous blanket of contaminants growing ever thicker in the air,  
something his mind can’t wholly grasp that slams into his head like  
an incomprehensible avalanche of bullets and coal and pigshit -- 

**_and what about you? the man asks:_**  
**_wavering, always caught_**  
**_somewhere between feral and civilized_**  
**_one foot held fast by another world_**  
**_tormented, hounded, haunted_**

\-- sees the sky bruised and sullen,  
torn open with lightning, roaring with cannonades as  
the foundations of civilization tremble  
in cities, highways, croplands  
as storms and hurricanes and tempests toss their angry thundered heads,  
maddened by the burgeoning heat and  
three sheets to the wind with  
the vapors rising from their salted cups;  
they trip drunkenly over the roads and buildings and levies,  
their staggering paths trailing footprints that  
you couldn’t fill with a hundred tons of sand -- 

**_redemption, she replies, looking out the window._**  
**_John could swear she looks right at him,_**  
**_she looks like an old family picture he saw once,_**  
**_he thinks: a woman whose face he’s never seen_**  
**_but without whom he would never have been_**

\-- sees men rushing, charging, chasing back and forth  
in ever broader ever widening gyres,  
city centers discharging people like swarms of wasps,  
devouring the hills and lakes and forests and farmlands  
in endless sprawling hunger and thirst;  
desperate, they kill each other  
for water or food or refuge,  
for black blood of the earth  
or for sacred creeds  
or for honeyed lies  
until the fire comes and burns them all away -- 

**_together, the man and the woman, the refugees,_**  
**_they succeed,_**  
**_though not all survive,_**  
**_but if either is not present:_**

\-- the globe drowning and scalding and broiling until  
there’s nothing left of ice or snow.  
floods engulf the shores, then boil away  
as bright cinders fly and the whole world burns -- 

**_things fall apart, the center cannot hold,_**  
**_mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,_**  
**_the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere_**  
**_the ceremony of innocence is drowned_**

\-- and always, always, twisting through everything he sees:  
an interweaving, perplexing labyrinth of choices and decisions, chances and intents, that he  
can’t possibly navigate by memory because there’s too much, far  
too much, but maybe just maybe if he  
can anchor his premonitions  
to a path that doesn’t lead  
to an irrevocable  
end of all  
that is  
he – 

.  
.  
.

– felt the hard yank of a palm against his as he was hauled upright, and the room was far too bright and the noises too loud and that comprehension, whatever it might have been, was seeping from him like water down a sink’s drain.

“Are you all right?” Xavier asked, concerned, staring. “For a moment there I thought I sensed – is something wrong? How do you feel?”

“I…” John swallowed hard, chills shuddering through his body, and for an instant he flashed on an image of how Xavier must see him: pale as a sheet, pupils blown wide, mouth gaping like a fish. The tumble of understanding and intuition and _not-memory_ whirled tempestuously inside his head, already fading from consciousness like a nightmare shaken away in the grey light of dawn. How did he feel? _Freaked-out. Insecure. Neurotic. Emotional._ “I’m… fine.”

The ironic humor of that word, matched against the boil of emotions and hunches roiling turbulently inside his head, didn’t escape him. But neither did the certainty settling inside of him like a brick. 

If he went with these men, he _could_ leave prison here, now, and he was quite certain which of the myriad paths he’d glimpsed his life would go forward on. _Camraderie. Friendship. Kinship. Understanding._

And reasonably sure what would happen once he’d done so. What he would find at the end of that path: _himself, laid out on a blinding white beach._

John swallowed again, let Xavier’s hand slip from his grasp. It, whatever it was, had been so viscerally immediate and _real_. He wanted very much to put his fingers to his throat, to touch, to make certain he wasn’t already wounded, gasping, dying.

Not without effort, he kept his hands at his side. 

“I believe what you’re doing is the right thing, Mr. Xavier,” John said, after a moment’s thought. He saw Xavier begin to smile, and he turned away to set the overturned chair upright. “But I’m afraid I can’t come with you.”

Xavier opened his mouth, closed it, pursed his lips. “Well, that was… unexpected.”

John moved the toppled chair back in front of the table. Sat down once again. He _wanted_ to tell them what he’d seen, let the words pour out of him like water from a pitcher. That was, perhaps, the most frightening thing. He’d never been one to just spill details, yet the urge to do so still itched at him like a mosquito bite begging to be scratched. But if he did – even with the prescience of what he believed he knew about all their probable paths, a tide of facts and images and emotions that was ebbing even now – would it change things for better, or worse?

Lensherr looked perplexed. Xavier looked intrigued. “Can you tell me why not?”

“No,” John replied, as calmly as he could, looking at the Brit standing there. Calm was probably the furthest thing from him right now.

“You saw something,” Xavier said, narrowing his eyes.

“I can’t say.” John thought of the sun, burning, blinding, incandescent, and Xavier blinked, accepting, and moved back around the table. “May I have that back?”

They looked at him. He nodded at the lockpick Lensherr still held, took it when it was offered, fitted it carefully back into the _other_ sleeve’s hem. Hopefully the guards wouldn’t examine that too closely when they…

John closed his eyes for a moment, took a breath, and began to fit the handcuffs back around his wrists.

.  
.  
.

They leave without making too much of a fuss.

John follows his hunches.

More often than not, they keep him from trouble.

Or at least, from _worse_ trouble.

In October, John reads about the standoff between the U.S. and the Soviets off the shores of Cuba and shudders, thinking of wrong turns and blinding white beaches and blood, drowning him. In November, he’s released from Rikers, and starts his life anew. This time, he’s smarter: he gets away from New York, despite all the history and friends he has there, opens a locksmith’s business a hundred miles down the road. He sets up shop down on a quiet street off the main boulevard, over on the northern side of King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. It’s far enough from New York City to start over, close enough to go back if he needs to. The best of both worlds.

He tests himself, carefully. Tests the abilities Xavier and Lensherr were so sure he possessed. They aren’t anything tremendously overt, as far as he can tell – no heat rays from his eyes, no leaping over tall buildings with a single bound – but they are consistent. There’s his intuition, for one thing, which he’d always known without realizing it to be unusual. But there’s also a ken for the workings of any mechanism he can put his hands to, and a talent for manipulating them that goes beyond the normal constraints of any other safe-cracker he’s ever come across. Enough, when combined with his innate dexterity, to make him very, _very_ good at getting past or into damn near any lock or safe ever made.

Years pass.

In 1972, as the leaves on the trees are turning, John meets a honey-haired woman named Shirley McNichol in a dive bar just outside of Philadelphia and falls head over heels for her. He woos her, courts her, proposes to her; he’s nowhere near Paris or Washington D.C. in the months and the chaos that follow ( _gunfire, shapeshifters, giant robots, RFK Stadium falling from the sky_ ). He could swear that he sees Charles Xavier in the tumult of the crowd during the broadcast from the White House, but he can’t be certain. He _knows_ that was Erik Lensherr, delivering his messianic speech to the world. 

He’s never sure, after, if he followed a premonition when he pursued Shirley or if he just fell in love, but he knows (in August of 1975, holding his newborn daughter Stella) that it was the right choice.

In 1981, when the first green is blossoming on the trees and Ronald Reagan is recovering from nearly being assassinated, John ignores a qualm about a particular element of a plan not being in place and the job – a heist for over a million dollars’ worth of gems from a vault in Pittsburgh – goes sour. He spends most of the decade in the State Correctional Institute in Camp Hill as a result, watching the warmth in Shirley’s eyes grow colder and more distant, and does everything he can while inside to stay out of trouble. He writes her, and Stella, as often as he can, treasures what letters and visits he gets from them both. 

The 80’s, even from inside a prison cell, are surreal in ways John can’t wholly put words to. Society turns even more crass and materialistic, seemingly overnight, and he keeps hearing rumors of shadowy conflicts taking place all over the world: in the stifling jungles of Nicaragua, in the graffiti-choked subway trains and tunnels underneath New York City, in the craggy snow-wreathed peaks of Afghanistan. In Angola, Iran, Cambodia. And in all too many of those stories, the undertone of individuals with unusual abilities – mutants.

There are some who claim that mutants are a growing social and cultural force, that someday soon they’ll be accepted just like any other minority, judged by their individual actions and not by the labels applied to them ( _freak, monster, genejoke, mutie_ ). But John has watched how things have changed, and how they haven’t changed, over decades: Jessup County, Mississippi. The Selma to Montgomery march. The Stonewall riots. Malcom X and Martin Luther King and Harvey Milk. 

John has his doubts about just how much minorities are accepted by easily swayed majorities. The fact that he, at first glance, looks like he’s in the majority in pretty much every category (white, male, straight, and arguably Christian) doesn’t lessen his anxiety about someone else discovering the unusual abilities he possesses. All it would take would be one major disaster attributable to mutants, and America – along with the world – would polarize.

John gets paroled from the 10-year sentence early, in 1988, for good behavior. Walking out the prison’s gate as summer cools toward autumn, he feels a weight lift from him, that foreboding that _he doesn’t want to be there_ washing away like grime scrubbed with soap and hot water. It’s not any dissuading sense telling him he needs to settle down, live a normal life inside the bounds of the law, nothing like that. He is what he is, a thief and a safe-cracker, and that’s defined him all his life. It’s just… intuition.

An apprehension.

He settles into middle-age and domesticity and starts to get to know his wife, who's approaching her early forties with as little joy as one might expect, and his daughter, who's just on the cusp of adolescence, all over again.

It turns out Stella has just as much of a talent for locks as her old man. He wonders about that, more than occasionally, but doesn't tell her -- doesn't tell _anyone_ \-- his suspicions.

Later that year John crosses paths with an enterprising young kid named Charlie, who has a nascent talent for planning and fingers nearly as deft as his own. The kid’s got charisma and panache, even if he doesn’t have quite the same touch for locks, but John sees in him a little too much of the cockiness he himself possessed in his youth. With a mix of experience and prescience he steers Charlie away from a confrontation with Mafia heavies Jimmy Prato and Joey Naples over a moderate gambling debt in Youngstown, Ohio. Sure, Prato turned up dead later that year, and Naples likewise by 1991, but if he hadn’t guided Charlie away from his plans to steal back what Charlie had been convinced Naples had wrongfully taken, well, John’s sure things could’ve gone ugly faster than anyone else would’ve believed.

In 1989, October, there’s the smell of burnt coffee in the wind, and he reads in the newspaper about the prison riots in SCI Camp Hill with a feeling like someone just walked over his grave.

In 1991, throughout the summer before her sixteenth birthday, John teaches Stella how to drive a stick-shift. They race up and down empty parking lots, slaloming around concrete streetlamp-pillars and between planters overflowing with flowers, and he thinks, watching her giggle and frown and whoop with excitement, that he’s never loved anyone as he does his daughter. For her birthday, on a whim, he uses some of the proceeds of a jewelry heist to buy her a brand-new apple-green Ford Taurus SHO that he shouldn’t, quite, be able to afford, reveling in the delight on Stella’s face.

The way that Shirley looks at him after that isn’t nearly as affectionate. Two years later, after he’s indicted again for burglary and grand larceny, she files for divorce. 

In 2001, John finally gets released on parole. His hair is nearly white as snow now, the color leached away by the passage of years, but his hands are as deft as they’ve always been and his expertise is still widely acknowledged in discriminating circles. In early September, he turns down an opportunity to do a job with a man named Keller in Manhattan, pleading age, parole, and a desire to go straight, but the truth is, he thinks, that what little he’s heard of Keller’s plan leaves him with numerous misgivings. After the 11th – as the television flashes the same images of towers falling in New York, over and over again, a catastrophic vision of staggering proportions – he’s no longer as sure that was the reason.

Still. The next time Charlie calls him up about a job, he takes the time to listen.

In 2003, in Venice, Italy, under a plan of Charlie’s devising, John cracks a safe holding hundreds of gold bricks with Balinese dancers engraved on them. It’s the last heist of his career, he thinks, something to retire on. Beforehand, impulsively, he sends Stella a diamond necklace from a store off Saint Mark’s Square; after, in the Alps forty kilometers from Austria, he just as impulsively lets everyone else into the van before him, putting himself in the seat nearest the passenger-side door as they take the long winding road down the mountainside and across the icy dam.

He doesn’t apprehend what’s coming, not truly.

It’s just a hunch.

**Author's Note:**

> The four lines including and immediately following “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold” is a direct quote from William Butler Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming”, which possesses imagery too vivid for me not to steal at least a small portion of it for use in John’s visions of potentialities to come.
> 
> This series is predicated on two fan theories of mine:
> 
> First, it presupposes that John Bridger was (obviously) a low-level mutant. Nothing flashy, most of the time: mainly heightened dexterity and senses, enough to put him well above average. He had a little bit of precog (his “hunches” steering him one way or the other, away from those that might be hunting for him without good intent), and he also possessed a clairsentience and limited telekinesis which could link to anything he could lay his hands on. That’s a substantial part of what allows him, at least in my fanon, to so quickly crack a safe with his eyes closed, underwater, while wearing noisy scuba gear.
> 
> Second, that Stella Bridger is Furiosa’s grandmother, and that particular traits – dexterity, foresight, a certain amount of clairsentience, and impressive ability with complex devices (such as, say, safes, or vaults, or cars) where the controlling mechanisms are within arm’s reach – run in the family bloodline. Remember Stella’s newfound ability to crack a safe she hadn’t practiced with, by touch – something she’d never attempted seriously before, but that she was able to do intuitively with the proper encouragement and opportunity. Remember Furiosa’s ability to hit a moving target in the dark, over a hundred meters away, or the way she was able to snipe the motorcyclists jumping over the top of the war rig. Remember how both of them were astonishingly good drivers, able to weave vehicles with amazing prescience and agility through a variety of high-stress situations.
> 
> Remember Furiosa’s competence and agility with that surprisingly adept mechanical arm.
> 
> Finally – and hopefully this came through clearly! – John was apprehensive at the beginning of this story because he could sense Charles Xavier trying to find him, telepathically, through Cerebro.
> 
>  
> 
> Things researched in the course of writing this fic:  
> • The history and geography of the World Trade Centers and what preceded them.  
> • Classification of, and punishment for, felonies in the states of New York and Pennsylvania.  
> • Prison organization and history (including personnel) at Rikers Island (New York Department of Corrections).  
> • Prisons in Pennsylvania (and proximity to Philadelphia).  
> • History of the cities of King of Prussia and Bridgeport, Pennsylvania.  
> • Design of, and how to get out of, double-action handcuffs.  
> • Pennsylvania mobsters (specifically having to do with the Pittsburgh and Youngstown, OH branches).  
> • Appearance and behavior of Charles Xavier and Erik Lensherr, both through general movie observation and via these pictures:  
> o Charles: http://americasuits.com/image/data/x-men-first-class-professor-x-aka-dr-charles-xavier-coat/x-men-first-class-professor-x-aka-dr-charles-xavier-coat.jpg  
> o Erik Lensherr: http://images4.fanpop.com/image/photos/23600000/Erik-Lensherr-x-men-first-class-23657434-640-427.jpg  
> • Repeated rewatchings of The Italian Job (2003), X-Men First Class, and various clips from Mad Max Fury Road. *facepalm*  
> • Details of (and value of) gem and jewel heists.  
> • The cars being manufactured and sold around 1991-1992.  
> • And so much other random info, I swear, OMG.


End file.
